I had no idea that a prosecution of the private corporation tasked with vetting employees of private corporations conducting the most sensitive of public work—dealing with our nation’s security—was going on. The firm involved has agreed to pay a fine of $30 but there is no mention of how many millions the company received from government contracts, nor the news that we no longer trust this company to help protect our security.

The most important and, obvious, sentence in the piece is this:

The justice department said that from March 2008 through at least September 2012, [United States Investigations Services Inc, the private firm that vetted former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden] deliberately circumvented quality reviews of completed background investigations in order to increase its revenues and profits.

Surprise, surprise, an organization whose very heart and soul demands the increase of revenues and profits to assuage the cravings of shareholders cut corners to do just that. No corporation can ever be expected to do less.

—from Wings of Fire: An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam, p. 175

Gavin Aung Than writes:

Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (1931-2015) was a scientist, aeronautical engineer, writer, and the 11th President of India, serving from 2002-2007. During his decorated 40-year scientific career, Kalam pioneered India’s space, missile and nuclear programs, earning him the nickname “Missile man of India”. Some of the posts he held include director of India’s first satellite launch vehicle, chief of the guided missile development program and chief scientific advisor to the Prime Minister.

We don’t send people to school to become parents. They don’t have to be board certified and licensed to produce progeny. People, even when they want to be good parents, make mistakes. I’m sure that Kalam’s parents thought they were doing the very best for their son, ensuring him a prosperous future. More importantly, perhaps, I think that any person able to answer the questions that Kalam asks before this quote—Are you aware of your inner signals? Do you trust them? Do you have the focus of control over your life in your own hands?—are critical because I don’t think we all have that focus. Kalam was extraordinary in that respect. The vast majority of humans are followers, not leaders.

Still, we all can honestly answer the questions, if only to ourselves, and act accordingly.

Louis C.K. takes us to task for hyperbole, but there are moments in our lives that are amazing and awesome. For me, one of those moments came on Christmas Eve, 1968 when astronaut William Anders snapped the photo above of the first Earthrise witnessed by humans. Years later, another space photo of Earth, taken from the Voyager I space craft from 3.7 million miles away awed humanity. Of that photo—mouse over above—Carl Sagan wrote:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. —Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

All of this is a lead up to Oliver Burkeman’s Awe: the powerful emotion with strange and beautiful effects. Burkeman writes:

If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t need psychological research to convince you that you need more awe in your life: a trip to Yosemite or the Sheeps Head Peninsula, or merely watching the BBC’s Planet Earth or The Cave of Forgotten Dreams ought to do the trick. But here’s some psychological research for you anyway: according to work recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which I found via Smithsonian magazine, feeling awe in the face of overwhelming natural environments is associated with more “pro-social” behaviors of generosity and kindness.

No wonder, then, that I, an millions of others who have seen Earthrise and The Pale Blue Dot, have turned to environmentalism in some way. How could we not feel small and vulnerable and an imperative to protect the only home we will ever have?

So, The New York Times talks to highly paid Amazon employees looking to be treated like they’re still living at home with their shelf of Best Smile trophies. Well, boo hoo hoo. Welcome to the real world where work is work. These people fell for the do what you love and the money will follow bull shit and Now they’re upset because they don’t get to play video games and eat free pizza all day.

You want to know why I have zero sympathy for these spoiled brats? Because back in 2012 Mac McClelland went undercover and wrote the real story about Amazon workers, a job so tough that McClelland didn’t last three days.

Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, writing in Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace lede:

On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. [They’re not talking about the kind of wall that Donald Trump, and other Republicans, want to build along our southern border, but rather the kind of wall marathoners talk about or the wall in Officer And A Gentleman. JH] To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar”—the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

Oh please. Did these cry babies think that The Apprentice was fake television like professional wrestling?

Maybe they should spend a few weeks as a real Amazon worker.

A week ago Monday I wrote, in POLICE PWN LA TIMES, GET TED RALL FIRED… about The Los Angeles Times taking a dupe of a faked, 12-year-old audio tape as grounds to fire cartoonist Ted Rall.

Rall has not taken the insult lightly. Sam Thielman, writing in Fired Los Angeles Times cartoonist hits back at newspaper for siding with LAPD for The Guardian tells us:

Award-winning cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall has accused the Los Angeles Times of wrongly casting doubt on his professional integrity, retracting one of his columns and ending his freelance work with the paper in order to curry favor with the Los Angeles police department.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has called for an investigation into the process resulting in the Rall’s dismissal, saying the Times “should have demanded a higher standard of proof in this matter”.

A frequent critic of the LAPD and winner of multiple national awards, Rall was formerly a staple of the Los Angeles Times opinion pages. The controversy centers on a column he wrote in May about jaywalking fines, which began with Rall’s recollection of a 2001 incident during which the cartoonist claimed he was handcuffed and “roughed up” by an LAPD officer, who threw his driver’s license into the sewer, during a jaywalking stop. Rall also says he was not jaywalking at the time.

A jaywalking stop? In Los Angeles? What? There was no actual crime being committed within say five blocks of the officer in question? Fast forward 12 years.

In July, Rall said he received a call from the LA Times’ Paul Pringle, a Polk and Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter whose focus is institutional corruption. Rall said that Pringle questioned him aggressively about the incident and then told him: “The LAPD says that none of this ever happened.”

“‘There never was a crowd, there never was any shouting at the cop, you were never handcuffed, he never roughed you up, he never threw your driver’s license on the ground,’” Rall said Pringle told him.

When Rall protested, Pringle cited the audio tape, which Rall had not known existed.

“I started to wonder: ‘Oh my god, I’m almost 52, am I getting old? Am I losing my mind? What’s going on?’”

Rall asked Pringle for the tape and said hearing it jogged his memory. He said he remembered the officer speaking to him in a tone he described as “jaunty” while handling him roughly.

Since, in his words, “that tape isn’t exactly Industrial Light and Magic”, Rall paid to have the audio cleaned up and claims it is now possible, among other things, to hear an onlooker say “why’d you handcuff him?”

Rall has produced both the original and an enhanced version of the recording the Times told him it heard, claiming that dialogue on the cleaned-up tape exonerates him. He also questions why the mostly incomprehensible tape was used against him in the first place.

The incredible bit here, for me, is that LAPD, reportedly a sophisticated and savvy organization, resorted to a doctoring of a tape so amateurish that I would expect better from a seventh grade science student.

We were this close to winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, achieving lasting peace in our time, bringing all the peoples of the Middle East to accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior and losing 10 pounds in just 10 days. That’s the fantasy Republicans in general and the clown-car brigade in particular would have us believe.

Sadly, none of the delusions above are true (well, maybe you could lose 10 pounds in 10 days) but if you repeat a lie often enough, people will begin to accept that your myth is their reality. Peter Beinart, in The Surge Fallacy for The Atlantic writes:

More than three-quarters of Republicans want American ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq, and a plurality says that stopping Iran’s nuclear program requires an immediate military strike.

As long as their son’s and daughters aren’t the ones with boots on the ground, of course; this is why I continue to favor the return to a universal draft. Beinart sees the myth that we were winning the war before the Kenyan Marxist took office as the driving force beneath the blood lust. Except we were never even in the same zip code of victory.

The decline in violence was astonishing: In 2007, the war took the lives of 26,000 Iraqi civilians. In 2008, that number fell to just over 10,000. By 2009, it was down to about 5,000. When Republicans today claim that the surge succeeded—and that with it Bush won the war—this is what they mean.

But they forget something crucial. The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.”

But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred. According to the legend of the surge, Iraq’s collapse stems from Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops at the end of 2011. “If we’d had a residual force of 10,000 to 12,000,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last year, “I am totally convinced there would not have been a rise of al-Qaeda.” In reality, the prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, began persecuting the Sunnis—thus laying the groundwork for their embrace of ISIS—long before American troops departed the country. As early as 2007, writes Emma Sky, who advised both Petraeus and his successor, General Ray Odierno, “the U.S. military was frustrated by what they viewed as the schemes of Maliki and his inner circle to actively sabotage our efforts to draw Sunnis out of the insurgency.”

When you’re allowed to move the goalposts at will, getting sacked for a 12-yard loss can suddenly look like a game changing play.

I’m thinking that he had lived, Ronald Reagan would not recognize where the crazies have taken the party he thought he had brought back from the Nixonian cliff. While the Republican Party is great for Comedy Central and others making a living from political humor, I don’t see how this can be any good for the country.

Matt Taibbi, in Inside the GOP Clown Car, for Rolling Stone writes:

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.

Except, of course, The Donald is far from being a madman, and that is what really scares me. Taibbi continues:

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.

Pundits always complained that there wasn’t enough talk about issues during these races, but in reality, issues were still everything. Behind the scenes, where donors gave millions for concrete favors, there was always still plenty of policy. And skilled political pitchmen like Christie, who could deftly deliver on those back-room promises to crush labor and hand out transportation contracts or whatever while still acting like a man of the people, were highly valued commodities.

Not anymore. Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million while raising just $100,000.

If The Donald wants to loan another $98.2 million, what’s to stop him?

So, images crowds of protesters engulfed in clouds of tear gas result in uncomfortable images of militarized police earning their Michael Brown Bonus. Sound waves, however, are invisible and military contractor LRAD is cashing in on that fact with police forces across America.

Lee Fang, writing in Acoustic Cannon Sales to Police Surge After Black Lives Matter Protests for The//Intercept tell us:

During a company conference call with financial analysts last week, Tom Brown, the chief executive of LRAD, a military contractor, informed investors that sales were rolling in, not just from Chinese government agencies and the U.S. Navy, but also from American law enforcement.

LRAD manufactures an acoustic cannon that can be used either as a mounted loudspeaker or as a weapon to fire deafening noises at crowds of people.

Over the last year, following a wave of protests over officer-involved killings of black Americans, LRAD has seen an uptick in inquiries from police departments around the country.

Brown told financial analysts in a May conference call about the “renewed interest” from police departments. “A lot of grant money starts to flow to law enforcement, and we’re getting a lot of inquiries” following protests, he said. One inquiry he mentioned came from the Maryland Sheriff’s Department following the protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray.

Speaking to investors, LRAD executives explained that their product was on site in Baltimore, on loan from Montgomery County, Maryland, though officers ended up not using it on demonstrators. But, the LRAD executives added, the New York Police Department used the cannon as a loudspeaker to order demonstrators in Union Square who were holding a solidarity protest in support of the Baltimore actions to disperse.

So, what does a LRAD sound like?

Every time I think that we’ve seen the last stupid police officer, that we’re turning a corner on institutional racism in America, along comes another clueless cop to burst my bubble. This is the reason why we need Black Lives Matter, because to people like Todd J Bakula, Black lives are just a way to score a great weekend with his wife.

Steven W Thrasher, in Missouri police officer brags about spending ‘annual Michael Brown bonus’ for The Guardian, writes:

St Louis County police are investigating a Facebook comment in which one of their officers appears to brag about the extra income he earned while working during protests in Ferguson which marked the one-year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown.

Officer Todd J Bakula, known as “TJ”, appears to be showing off about extra money earned while part of a massive police response throughout this week with the anniversary demonstrations of Brown’s death, which saw St. Louis County cops working long hours.

“I decided to spend my annual Michael Brown bonus on a nice relaxing bicycle ride trip to Defiance,” a Missouri recreation destination about 40 miles from Ferguson, Bakula wrote on his personal Facebook page under the name TJ Thekoola. “Eating dinner now and staying at a bed and breakfast tonight.”

After reviewing the Facebook post, Shawn McGuire, media relations officer at St Louis County police, confirmed to the Guardian by email that “Police officer Bakula is a patrolman with the St Louis County police department.”

“We understand the post is controversial,” McGuire said.

A white cop is jubilant because he scores his Michael Brown Bonus and gets to take a sweet vacation with his wife and the best word you can think of is controversial? Me thinks that Shawn McGuire is just sad he didn’t get his Michael Brown Bonus.

[Update at 1556 on 18 August—Lee Glendinning, Editor, Guardian US, was kind enough to send me a note regarding my concerns about the Kayla Mueller story. The correction would have been more than sufficient. Glendinning writes:

Hello Jeff

This wording has been changed, and a correction note placed in the piece.

Thank you for your note, and for reading.

Best wishes

Lee

Yet another example of the class act that is The Guardian.]

[Update at 0733—I just checked the Kayla Mueller story and discovered this: This headline and body text of this article were amended on 15 August 2015 to clarify that Kayla Mueller was raped while in captivity. The headline and lede now read:

Kayla Mueller was raped by Isis leader before her death, officials say.

The late American hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly raped by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group, US officials have said.

Mueller, an aid worker, was held for a time by Islamic State financier Abu Sayyaf and his wife, Umm Sayyaf. Baghdadi reportedly took Mueller as a “wife”, and repeatedly raped her when he visited, her parents Carl and Marsha Mueller were told.

My email, posted below, must have been one of thousands flooding the Guardian’s in-boxes.

Good on you Guardian.]

The Guardian this morning (no comments allowed) has a story about Kayla Mueller with the headline: Kayla Mueller forced to have sex with Isis leader before her death, officials say.

The lede to the story, based partially on an Associated Press wire story, is:

The late American hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly forced to have sex with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State group, US officials have said.

Mueller, an aid worker, was held for a time by Islamic State financier Abu Sayyaf and his wife, Umm Sayyaf. Baghdadi reportedly took Mueller as a “wife”, and repeatedly forced her to have sex with him when he visited, her parents Carl and Marsha Mueller were told.

So, three times—once in the head and twice in the lede, we are told that Mueller was forced to have sex.

What the bloody fuck, Guardian? Mueller was raped. Repeatedly. Why the fucking euphemism?

I sent this email to Matt Sullivan, deputy head of news for Guardian US at 0543:

Good morning Mx. Sullivan,

I’m gobsmacked. In your piece concerning Kayla Mueller, three times, once in the head and twice in the lede, you use the phrase “forced to have sex.”

She wasn’t “forced to have sex,” she was “raped.” Repeatedly. The word “rape” only appear in the text of the link for the story:

(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/14/islamic-state-leader-raped-kayla-muller-abu-bakr-baghdadi).

As a journalist I can think of no intelligent reason for the use of a euphemism here. None.

I would have left this objection as a comment, but none were permitted on the story.

Do all you can to make today a good day,

Jeff Hess

Last Tuesday I wrote about watching the documentary Fed Up, a film exploring the obesity epidemic in America and the central role played by sugar in that national disaster. This morning, while reading about Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir, a Mauritanian sentenced to death for the crime of writing an article critical of the prophet Mohammed, I was drawn to the click bait in the right-hand column: What Eating 40 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day Can Do to You. Anahad O’Connor writes:

Soda has been a major target in the debate over sugar and its role in the obesity crisis. But high levels of added sugars can be found in many seemingly healthful foods, from yogurts to energy bars and even whole-grain bread.

A new movie called “That Sugar Film” seeks to educate consumers about the hazards of consuming too much added sugar, which can be found in an estimated 80 percent of all supermarket foods. The new documentary stars an Australian actor-director, Damon Gameau, who modeled his movie after “Super Size Me,” the 2004 film that followed Morgan Spurlock as he consumed an all-McDonald’s diet for 30 days.

In “That Sugar Film,” which first had its debut in Australia this year, Mr. Gameau gives up his normal diet of fresh foods for two months to see what happens when he shifts to eating a diet containing 40 teaspoons of sugar daily, the amount consumed by the average Australian (and an amount not far from the 28 teaspoons consumed daily by the average American teenager). The twist is that Mr. Gameau avoids soda, ice cream, candy and other obvious sources of sugar. Instead, he consumes foods commonly perceived as “healthy” that are frequently loaded with added sugars, like low-fat yogurt, fruit juice, health bars and cereal.

Growing up I remember my mother sprinkling tab sugar on my tomato soup (which already has already has 10 grams of sugar per half cup serving) and my grandfather sprinkling the same on my half a grapefruit. Neither food needs added sugar. That is not what Gameau is demonstrating. Instead, he’s gone after the sugar in foods we would never add sugar to at the table.

I recently did the calculations based on the recommendation that no more than 5 percent of my calories come from sugars. My weight-loss calorie consumption target (216.5 this morning, down 1.3 pounds from yesterday) is 1,600 calories per day. Five percent of that is 80 calories per day. That works out to 20 grams (4 calories per gram) of sugars from processed foods per day. That is a hard target to hit once you start reading labels. The easiest way to do so is to simply not eat processed foods.

The first food category to fall of my consumption list was fruit juice. I drank 200 ml of grapefruit juice daily (14 grams of not-added sugar and 135 ml of carrot juice another 7.3 grams. Those two together blow my goal. So, they’re gone. That leaves my half a power bar, 2.5 grams of sugar (morning snack with my coffee at 0400); 45 grams of granola, 10.5 grams (breakfast at 0800) and tomato soup, 25 grams (lunch) for a total of 35.5 grams of processed sugar. That is 178 percent of my target.

The soup has to go too. Now I have a moral dilemma. I have four cases of Campbell’s healthy choice (yeah, right) tomato soup in my larder. Do I throw the cans away (that would be difficult for me) or donate the cans to a food bank and contribute to the sickness of the person eating the soup?

Bill McKibben convinced then Guardian Editor Alan Rushbridger to take on what has become Rushbridger’s legacy: Keep Carbon In The Ground.

McKibben is convinced that Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who will address Global Warming and Climate Change. He writes:

Why is the next presidency so important?

There are many answers to that question, but one is that the next president will be the first to come to office in a world where solar panels are cheap. That’s potentially a very big deal, if leaders take full advantage of it.

For a quarter century now, scientists have been very worried—scared to death, in fact—about climate change. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened on our planet in the course of human history: the Arctic is melting, the oceans are acidifying, and the weather has turned dangerously weird almost everywhere.

And so we’ve fought at every turn: against tarsands mining (Bernie was the key guy on Capitol Hill in the Keystone fight) and mountaintop removal coal mining, against new coal ports and frack wells, for a serious price on carbon. It’s gone well; we’ve built a real movement, one that drew 400,000 people to New York (including one Vermont senator) for the biggest demonstration about anything in long time in this country.

But the fossil fuel industry, in its endless effort to keep the profitable status quo — even if it destroyed the planet — always had one ace in its hand: the fact Continue Reading »

Previously and the follow up, Alice is fine.

In the latest in the Keep Carbon In The Ground… campaign, Emma Howard writes:

Today in the Guardian, almost 1,000 health professionals from around the world have come together to ask the Wellcome Trust to move their money out of fossil fuel companies on ethical grounds. They have signed a letter calling on the multi-billion pound health charity to divest from fossil fuels in the name of one of the most fundamental principles of medical ethics: “do no harm.”

The Wellcome Trust says it is “dedicated to improving health by supporting bright minds in science, the humanities and social sciences, and public engagement”—so a call by hundreds of minds in the health profession could have the biggest impact of all.

The text of the ‘Do no harm’: Medical professionals urge Wellcome Trust to end fossil fuel investments The Guardian letter to the members of The Welcome Trust reads:

Dear members of the Wellcome Trust executive board,

We write as concerned health professionals and academics in relation to the Guardian’s Keep it in the ground campaign calling on the Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation to divest from the world’s 200 largest fossil fuel companies over the next five years.

The Wellcome Trust is an outstanding philanthropic institution whose work has a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of millions worldwide. We congratulate the Trust on its leadership in promoting and funding research into the impacts of climate change, and hope that this work will continue to grow in line with the urgent threat to human health and survival. However, we were disappointed to learn of the Trust’s decision to continue to invest in fossil fuel companies.

It is uncontested that the majority of carbon reserves listed on stock exchanges must remain underground if we are to avoid exceeding a 2C rise in Continue Reading »

By presenting the American public with a never-ending penguin march of frighteningly crazy white (mostly) men (mostly) the Republican Party lowers the bar so far as to make whichever white man (not mostly) gets the vote here at the convention next summer seems downright reasonable.

To make that strategy work, the operatives have to push and push and push everyone toward the wrong-wing cliff so that the sacrificial crazies can stay in the spotlight as long as possible. One what they do that is to bandy about cute catch phrases that belittle anyone who refuses a sufficient amount of crazy. This cycle the word du jour is cusckservative.

“Cuckservative”: noun, portmanteau of cuckold and conservative, pejorative internet slang. A conservative who is not conservative enough for some other conservatives, with implications of cowardice and sexual impotence and/or deviance.

The term “cuckservative” caught the eye of puzzled observers this week amid the froth of commentary floating around the race to become the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

It has been dubbed a sign of a “raging civil war” tearing the Republican party apart, “the GamerGate” of white supremacists, and a meme expressing “a certain kind of contempt”. But the dictionaries have yet to step in, leaving readers to take it apart more or less on their own.

The basics are simple: cuckold, a man with an adulterous wife or partner, and conservative, which in context means someone on the spectrum of 21st-century Republican thought.

The insult’s most general gist is conservatives accused of bowing to one non-conservative idea or another, eg immigration reform, should feel humiliated, their ideology adulterated.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is thus accused of cuckservatism for supporting a path to citizenship for immigrants, rather than the “big, beautiful wall” to enclose the United States, as endorsed by Donald Trump in last week’s GOP debate.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh alluded to the meme in praise of Trump on Wednesday, saying that “if Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he? would have apologized by now” for criticizing Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Way to push those not crazy enough (like Mx. Kelly?) to be called a conservative Mx. Limbaugh.

*previously…

I adopted their as a singular pronoun when I was in college after learning that the word had had that role in the 19th century, becoming a plural pronoun in the 20th century. My decision was driven both by a desire to be gender sensitive and because I could not stand the convoluted he/she, him/her &c.

Using my Merriam-Webster dictionary on line today, I came across this:

Last month, news broke that the Oxford English Dictionary added a new honorific for inclusion in their dictionaries: the gender-neutral Mx, used as a title for those who do not identify as being of a particular gender, and for those who are transgender—or, for people who simply don’t want to be identified by gender.

Pronounced to sound like mix or mux, the title Mx. (which, like other honorifics, is styled without the period in British English) is used increasingly on various official forms in the UK, including driver’s licenses and banking documents.

Although the earliest print evidence of Mx. is from a 1977 issue of an American magazine called Single Parent, the title has not seen much official or published use in the US. It did, however, appear twice in recent days in The New York Times: a June 4th article noted Mx. as someone’s preferred honorific, and a June 5th article all about Mx. made it clear that the June 4th use was an exception. The title simply isn’t familiar enough to the newspaper’s readers to be fully adopted.

Do we need to know the gender of someone we’re told about: report to Mx. Jones at 3 p.m. or Mx. Smith will see you now? Do we need any honorific at all if everyone gets the same honorific? Is this to become our Citizen or Comrade?

I’m inclined to make the shift, but somehow the x just makes me wince.

What do you think?

[Update at 0858 on 14 August: Chromosome answered my question. The circle is part of the WMCSM’s .5 child (note the plate to WMCSD’s left.) which makes my use of red here a bit prescient (and icky).]

Usually I have no problem with Derf’s art, but I’ve been staring at White Middle Class Suburban Daughter’s left hip/side trying to figure out what the circle (I added the color) is meant to represent.

Suggestions anyone?

[Update at 0725 on 14 August: Mano Singham comes at Mx. Trump from a different angle in Thinking the unthinkable.]

From Will Rogers to Lenny Bruce to George Carlin to Jon Stewart, American comics (and others) seem to better understand and articulate the nuances of American politics than all the pundits. Add Scott Adams to that list.

Adams has nailed Donald Trump and laid bare his hidden-in-the-open secrets:

If you’re keeping score, in the past month Trump has bitch-slapped the entire Republican Party, redefined our expectations of politics, focused the national discussion on immigration, proposed the only new idea for handling ISIS, and taken functional control of FOX News. And I don’t think he put much effort into it. Imagine what he could do if he gave up golf.

As far as I can tell, Trump’s “crazy talk” is always in the correct direction for a skilled persuader. When Trump sets an “anchor” in your mind, it is never random. And it seems to work every time.

Now that Trump owns FOX, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public, I’m going to predict he will be our next president. I think he will move to the center on social issues (already happening) and win against Clinton in a tight election.

Adams’ conclusion—that Trump will be our next president—is scary as hell, but I can’t fault his logic.